Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan

Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape.

The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.

The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn.

If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would be useless to those who spoke a different dialect.

Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.

I certainly have caught myself defending aspects of my country's culture, which seem weird to others, for exactly that reason.

You probably know that when a Kanji character is written in hiragana or katakana, you have no clue of the true meaning, it can be many different things. So how can it end without disrupting the whole language?

Actually I think it's the exact opposite for me. This is the beginning of where Hanzi and Kanji start to show their relative superiority (in some areas).

While Roman alphabets are phonetic, they have the trade-off that people with differing dialects cannot communicate. There is no 'Roman' language, there are dozens of European languages, learning all of them would be harder than learning one set of glyphs.

Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all. That native speakers often forget how to write words is testament to the effectiveness of 'spellcheck', and its reliability, reducing the need to memorize.

TL;DR The big downside to Kanji is the 'spelling', but with the advent of computers that probably will never be a problem ever again. Rather people who use these languages will be able to take advantage of their plus sides, including concision, visual meaning, and lack of phonetic dependence.

PS: The memorize ____ words to read a newspaper problem is way overblown, you'll still need to memorize ____ words in any alphabetical language too, and it's no easier than the asian languages.

Most of the character rote-learning and grammar occurred in kindergarden, first, and second grade. The "rote-learning" part was writing each character five or ten times, then use them in sentences. It took maybe half an hour of class + ten to twenty minutes of homework each day.

From the third grade on the focus shifts toward idioms, styles, poetry, etc. Essays began in the second grade. By the end of the sixth grade students are expected to be functional writers. I think high school focuses more on Classical Chinese and western literature.

As a native learner, the process actually felt quite effortless. Most of the student's time was spent on math, science, and classical music, which were much, much more painful for me in terms of the sheer amount of practice and rote memorization.

Character amnesia had never been a problem for me while I was in China (this was before computers were popular). Admittedly it is a problem now, since I haven't written by hand for 10+ years, but the characters come back to me if I write them out a few times.

One benefit that's often mentioned is its near standard semantics throughout Northeast Asia; another benefit not usually mentioned is that very few Westerners learn it. Leaders in a place as competitive as modern China might be thinking about this.

As an American, I'm just really hesitant to agree with this given how much better China and Japan seem to educate their students at math and the sciences.

Perhaps you come from a country that educates your people much better than Japan and China, which is why you can say such things.

In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."

That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai

And a Japanese typewriter since 1929

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter

"Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols. One of the most intriguing ways of studying what differences there may really be in processing is in observing brain-damaged patients - following certain lesions some patients can still read kana but not kanji, while other insults to the brain leave the ability to read kanji but not kana."

What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud.

Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.

> I makes it more difficult

I suppose you inadvertently illustrated the problem...

There's a big difference of degree here.